


One Is a Whole Number

by LittleRaven



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Accidental Use of the Force, Character Study, Communicating Across Time From an Alternate Dimension, Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Episode: s02e22 Twilight of the Apprentice Part 2, Gen, Post-Episode: s02e21-22 Twilight of the Apprentice, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, The Force, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-26
Updated: 2019-01-26
Packaged: 2019-10-16 12:04:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17549351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: Being in an isolated spot in the whole wide galaxy still means you're part of it.





	One Is a Whole Number

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Beatrice_Otter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beatrice_Otter/gifts).



She’s not meant to leave—not for a long, long time, at any rate. So. Ahsoka will explore instead. In the distance, she feels Anakin’s departure, and the wheeling of her companion Morai through the haze. There goes one life. She takes another step into the ruin of Malachor. 

 

Rey dreams. Usually, it’s her parents, the way they went up and left her in the dust. Red and stuffy; her throat burns with it, though her eyes had long since stopped doing the same. 

This one is red too, and heavy. She can hear the electricity crackling, the buzz and the thunder of explosions. Her chest is tight, a familiar feeling, for all that it’s not hers. She knows it; she doesn’t recognize it. 

When she wakes, there’s no time to linger on it. Every day is a scrap for another meal. She’s used to the nightmares. 

Still, her hands are on her rib cage, feeling her breath as it starts to come back, her heart as it remembers to whom it belongs. 

Rey puts her body to work, sifting through the sand and metal in the glare of Jakku’s sun, and her mind allows this. But it goes back. 

 

Ahsoka doesn’t sleep. It’s not a place of rest, a Sith Temple. Broken but not destroyed, it lingers on the edges of her skin, pushing to come in. She would not sleep even if it let her, but it won’t. It’s not subtle enough to lure her into vulnerability; none of the Sith have been known for that, she reflects, save one. It only demands. 

Her body, burnt from exertion and attacks received, is used to not giving into demands. Her eyes close as she sinks into the Force. There’s horror here, yes, older than what she has just endured. 

No reason to fight it. She accepts it instead, then moves on. 

There is pain. Pain under it all. She knows this too; her life’s companion, her shadow. Ahsoka breathes. Breathes again. 

It’s not going to leave. It doesn’t have to. She knows this. 

His face ripples into being across her eyelids; Ahsoka builds it from the golden eye, the new stress lines, the thick scarring. She imagines it becoming younger, smoother, still with the scar she knew—the only thing she recognizes, besides the momentary softening of expression, the killing rage that had come after. 

Not so unfamiliar after all. 

Easy to see, then. Hard to remember now, when it hadn’t worked out. 

That moment of hope, when he had let her see, before he’d crushed every possibility, as relentless as ever. 

It had been there. It is gone. He is still there. Her ability to help him is gone. 

Her breath hitches, her own words a mantra in her head. She says them aloud again.

“I can’t save mine.”

It’s not fine. It’s not. It’s just true. It sits in her heart, in her mind, as she breathes. 

The temple is dark, and she continues to exist in it. 

 

Rey welcomes the night. Even with the dreams. Her body is burnt by the sunlight, and from the exertion of work, whether her mind is in it or not. A change of pace is good. It’s always like this. 

Besides, at least now her dreams are different. Someone else is doing the hurting, and the being hurt. A story she can step into without taking part in it. No more parents leaving her behind. 

She stops her hands atop the airy loaf she’s just inflated. It sits under them, cold already in the desert evening’s draining of heat. 

Is she forgetting? She can’t forget. She already can’t describe the sounds of their voices, the shapes of their faces; there has never been anyone to describe them to, except herself. 

She’s let the dreams tell her, and now they are changing. 

Rey stops herself from squeezing her only meal to dust, just barely. 

After a long time, she eats. The sun is due to come back up soon. She sits on the floor, leans back against her makeshift bed, and lets dreamless sleep take her. 

 

The temple exists. She exists. The Force exists. All, together, exist. There’s a harmony in the disharmony, in the mismatch of her hopes and what they had come to. 

He rages against their connection, Ahsoka knows, wherever he is now. But he knows it. Precisely, she suspects, because he knows it, and knows she’s seen it too. Supposing her dead doesn’t give him the relief he won’t admit to craving. He’s just prolonged the time until it comes. 

It will come, one way or another. It’s as much out of his hands as it is out of hers, for all that he’ll always have a choice as to how it happens—as long as he’s alive. There’s always a choice. 

Hers, now, is to stay. 

Time enough for her to accept what must be accepted, let her feelings meet the actions she has already taken, the words spoken. 

 

No sleeping, no dreaming. No rest either. Sloppy work. 

No rations today. Rey’s hands curl into fists, her stomach into a hungry knot, as she stands before her empty plate. Unkar Plutt knows she’s the best, the quickest mind, the most perceptive eye. When she stops being that, he’s told her, he stops giving. 

She’d rather not sleep tonight, but her body won’t let her make another choice. It joins her traitorous mind in preferring the oblivion, the forgetting what until now she hasn’t understood she’s worked so hard to remember. Her life, all of it, dedicated to living long enough to return to what she’s lost. To memory.

It’ll have to keep for another night, Rey decides, no matter what happens to it during. She doesn’t need to forget. She does need to live. 

Her eyes close. 

 

Ahsoka doesn’t need to dream to see anymore. It’s been a long time since sleep has given her warnings or guidance. She doesn’t even need to close her eyes. 

She is here, in the Force, and the Force is everywhere, every-when, always flowing. It needs her to see now, to listen, and she does both. 

There will be a time when she has to leave. Soon. Not when this place releases her, but when she can feel the path she is to tread. She’s not trapped. She is waiting, and it’s no time at all, here where she’s found light again, seen that she hasn’t lost it at all. It’s always been there. 

 

Rey waits, knowing even in her sleep that it is waiting, not a prison, but a vigil. The days are all the same, the nights too—even when they’re different—suspended in time—and so she’s sure. She’ll be out, when she’s ready, when she has a place outside of this one. 

There’s a purpose waiting for her, and she’s choosing to meet it.


End file.
